I doubt many English-speaking readers of the blog will be aware of Jean Larteguy, but the Francophone ones might.
It's the pen-name of Pierre Lucien Osty, who Frenchman decided that he didn't like the Nazis, the Nazi occupation of France or not fighting back at the Nazi occupation of France. So he went off and joined the Free French and got in plenty of fighting. Come the end of the war he became a journalist and also wrote novels, a couple of which ("The Centurions" and "The Praetorians") have been translated into English.
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| Hmmm. They don't look Roman to me. |
As a journalist he worked as a war correspondent for Paris Match, including coverage of the war in Korea. Get this: in order to obtain a story he joined the French Battalion* and for his pains got injured in the battle of Heartbreak Ridge. That's commitment!
Are you paying attention The Metro?
Ha! Conrad's Trenchant Critiques Hit Home
- following right on the heels of that, we notice that The Metro is no longer lying about it's "Four Pages of" over-hyped one-name "celebrities" with big text and bigger photographs.
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| The now-truthful front page |
Because they really can't sustain the concentrated vitriol of BOOJUM!, and also one page is taken up by an advert:
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| POW! Smack in the kisser with the cricket bat of verity** |
Another Freaky Exoplanet
The more we look, the more we see, and the more we see, the more strange things get. I refer, of course, to the observation of extra-solar planets. This time a study has found a planet (probably a "Super Jupiter") with a ring system 200 times larger than that around Saturn. Herein the link to Aunty Beeb:
With an impressive artist's impression of the rings and what they would look in our Solar System. Pretty spectacular. Art Department:
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| What the heck. Close enough. |
Bus Poster Shortage
Not really a shortage of bus posters, just that they are all advertising the same Dog Buns! film - "Mortdecai". Whilst waiting at the bus stop three 409's went past, ALL WITH THE SAME POSTER!
I can rant, tant, vent and dissent but, dammit, I need material to work with. I'm a writer, not a high-energy physics scientific researcher***.
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| Less Decay, thanks. |
Irony, Thy Name Is "First Bus"
Conrad decided to venture into Royton, just to see how it was getting on. A few new shops, none of them bookshops so I have no interest in them and would be hard pressed to remember what they were.
Anyway, that's not what this post is about. Oh no. To get to Royton Conrad has to catch the bus, which is normally the 409, touted as arriving "every 10 minutes or better". Not that there was any sign of a 409 turning up, but - what's this! It's that rara avis the 24, turning up when I don't need it!
Needless to say on the return leg, with low traffic and few passengers, the 409 still managed to be late.
Oh, there is a link on the Beeb website about Artificial Intelligence and how big a threat it poses to humanity.
Conrad's solution? Assign AI research to First Bus. After a decade or so they'll have gotten to the stage of producing a ZX81.
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| After 27 years and £180 billion, First Bus show off their new AI. |
"The End Of An Ear"
No! Not Conrad playing around with language and puns, this is the title of an album by Robert Wyatt. His solo debut, in fact, made in 1970 and which Conrad has not heard for decades.
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| - is a lobe? |
Er - it might be described as "free form" and also "experimental", or what Wonder Wifey would call "That bloody racket!"
Since I was playing it in the kitchen while she was out, and she suddenly returned, Mr Wyatt's efforts went to "Pause".
* Who earned 3 Presidential Unit Citations when attached to the US 23rd Division. Those things don't come in cereal packets.
** "Verity" as in "truthfulness", not Phil and Rosie's daughter.
*** As you may have noticed.
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